The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to navigate through user interfaces.
Exemplary user interface navigation operations include scrolling through a user interface, selecting selectable objects within a user interface as well as activating selected objects within the user interface. Exemplary selectable objects include digital images, video, text blocks, hyperlinks, icons, and other objects with which a user is able to interact. A user may need to perform user interface navigation operations in virtually any computer program. For example, such operations may be performed in: an operating system (e.g., Mac OS X or iPhone OS from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.); a media display program (e.g., Front Row from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.); a set-top box application (e.g., the Apple TV user interface from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.); a file management program (e.g., Finder from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), an image management application (e.g., Aperture or iPhoto from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a digital content (e.g., videos and music) management application (e.g., iTunes from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a drawing application, a presentation application (e.g., Keynote from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a word processing application (e.g., Pages from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a website creation application (e.g., iWeb from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a disk authoring application (e.g., iDVD from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), or a spreadsheet application (e.g., Numbers from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.).
But existing methods for performing these navigation operations are cumbersome and inefficient. For example, using a sequence of mouse-based inputs to select one or more selectable objects and perform one or more actions on the selected selectable objects is tedious and creates a significant cognitive burden on a user. In addition, existing methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.